Privacy Policy

This page describes, plainly and specifically, what ThumbGrab actually collects, what it doesn't, and where your data goes when you use a tool on this site. It's written to match what the application really does — not a generic template — and it will be updated as new tools are added.

What We Don't Collect

• No accounts, no sign-up, no passwords, no email addresses.
• No advertising or tracking cookies. This site doesn't currently run analytics or ad scripts of any kind.
• No database of your activity. There is nothing tying "video URLs you've looked up" to an identity, because there is no identity to tie it to.

What We Do Collect, and Why

When you use the thumbnail downloader, your browser sends the YouTube link you pasted to our server so it can look up the video and fetch the thumbnail on your behalf. That request is logged briefly for operational purposes (see "Server Logs" below) and is not stored in any long-term or personally identifiable way.

Server Logs

Like virtually any web server, ours logs each request: the HTTP method, the path requested, the response status, and how long it took. Your IP address is never logged in raw form — it's one-way hashed (SHA-256, truncated) before it ever touches a log line, specifically so it can be used to detect abuse patterns (like a single source hammering the API) without that log entry being personally identifying. These logs exist to keep the service running reliably and are not sold, shared, or used for advertising.

Temporary Caching

To avoid re-fetching the same public YouTube data over and over, results for a given video are cached in server memory for a short, fixed period (currently up to an hour) before being automatically discarded. This cache is keyed by the video, not by you — it's a performance optimization, not a record of who asked for it.

Rate Limiting

To keep the service available for everyone, requests are counted per IP address over short rolling time windows to prevent abuse. This counter is temporary and held in server memory — it resets automatically and isn't retained after the window passes.

How Third-Party Services Are Used

A YouTube thumbnail downloader inherently has to talk to YouTube. Here's exactly what that involves:

• Fetching a thumbnail: our server requests the image directly from YouTube's official image hosts (i.ytimg.com / img.youtube.com) and streams it back to you. Your browser never contacts YouTube's servers directly for this — our server does, on your behalf.
• Video title and channel name: fetched from YouTube's public oEmbed endpoint using the link you provided. No account or personal data is involved on either side of that request.
• Playlist lookup and channel-wide export (only available if this deployment has a YouTube Data API key configured) send the relevant playlist or channel identifier to Google's YouTube Data API.
• AI-assisted title, description, hashtag, and tag suggestions (only available if this deployment has an AI provider key configured) send the topic or keywords you type into that specific tool to a third-party AI provider in order to generate suggestions. Nothing else on the page is sent — just the text you entered into that tool.

Children's Privacy

This site is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them. Since there are no accounts or sign-ups anywhere on the site, there is no mechanism by which we would knowingly gather a child's personal data in the first place.

Your Rights

Because we don't maintain accounts or a database of personal information, there is generally nothing to request, export, or delete on an individual basis — the closest thing to "your data" on this site is a request log entry that already doesn't identify you, and expires on its own. If you believe that's incomplete or have a specific concern, reach out using the contact details below.

Changes to This Policy

As new tools are added to ThumbGrab, this page will be updated to describe exactly how each one handles data, following the same standard: specific and accurate to what the tool actually does, not generic boilerplate. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent real change.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent to privacy@thumbgrab.example.com (replace with a real monitored address before launch).